30 March 2013

Sci-fi writers are supposed to be ahead of their time, but this is ridiculous! From Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon

"We are going to launch our own currency.” By saying this, Randy is divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard-on.

“How do you go about that? Don’t you have to be a government?”

“No. You have to be a bank. Why do you think they’re called banknotes? Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self-titillation but it is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn’t especially care.

“Okay but still, usually it’s done by government banks, right?”

Only because people tend to respect the government banks. But government banks in Southeast Asia have a huge image problem right now. That image problem translates directly into crashing exchange rates.”

“So how do you do it?”

Ger a big pile of gold. Issue certificates saying ‘this certificate can be redeemed for such-and-such an amount of gold.’ That’s all there is to it.”

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Sci-fi writers are supposed to be ahead of their time, but this is ridiculous! From Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon

"We are going to launch our own currency.” By saying this, Randy is divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard-on.